Branded entertainment is just getting into its stride and the potential is huge.
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Brand Architect reports on developments in the marketing services industry and hopefully contributes to the thinking that is shaping the intersecting worlds of brand consulting, advertising and management consulting.
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Sagacite
I am a founding partner of Sagacite Brand Agency, a strategic and creative brand consultancy. You can learn more about Sagacite by visiting www.sagacite.co.za
The number of ad pages in U.S. consumer magazines fell 30% in the second quarter of 2009 from a year earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported, indicating that the print advertising downturn has continued to accelerate.
“The recession has dealt a particular blow to the print publishing industry, as car companies, retailers and other major marketers pull back on advertising. Magazine ad-page declines have worsened steadily in the last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau: 26% in the first quarter, 17% in the fourth quarter of 2008, 13% in the third quarter and 8.2% in the second,” the newspaper reported.
My presentations on digital strategy for brands are getting longer, so rather than upload the entire presentations I decided to upload self-contained sections. The first one, Stop The Presses, deals with the accelerated decline of the traditional newspaper / magazine model and the options open to newspapers / magazines and the implications for both types of publications as well as the brands that advertise in them. Like all of my presentation a talking head is required in front of many of the slides. I have tried to minimize the lack of a presenter by adding brief notes to several slides. Hopefully, viewers of the presentation will understand the overall points being raised and arguments made.
Efforts to save the planet have produced some remarkable ads for organizations like WWF and Greenpeace. The Guardian newspaper has put together a collection of its selection of the 27 best ads. The one above was done by the Uncle Grey agency for WWF Denmark. The tag line reads “15m sq of rainforest disappears every minute”.
U.S. ad spend on social networks will drop 3% to $1.1 billion in 2009, research firm eMarketer forecast, reversing a projection made seven months ago that ad spend would grow to $1.3 billion this year.
“Those levels are just a fraction of total ad spending, but online advertising has been considered an important area of growth in the depressed ad industry,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “While social-networking sites have been popular with consumers, they have yet to gain significant traction with marketers.”
MySpace, which in May dropped behind rival Facebook in terms of unique U.S. visitors with online measurement firm comScore reporting 70.2m unique users for MySpace and 100,000 more for Facebook, remains the largest recipient in terms of ad spend and also the largest loser in terms of lost ad spend.
eMarketer predicted that U.S. ad spending on MySpace will fall 15% in 2009 to $495 million while ad spending at Facebook will increase 9% to $230 million. eMarketer projected that Facebook was on target to surpass MySpace in ad revenue by 2011.
“In 2008, U.S. ad spending on MySpace was $585 million, up 15% from 2007, and on Facebook was $210 million, up 50%, according to eMarketer,” the newspaper reported.
Stating much of what digital marketers and consumers already know, The New York Times recently reported on the power of the digital arena to deliver and share a brand communication.
“Advertising in its hallowed forms — television commercials, newspaper ads and the like — is a shrinking part of the marketing equation. New approaches, mostly on the Internet, are what increasingly matter. Advertisers have been shifting growing portions of their budgets online for years. But the popularity of social networking and other Web 2.0 phenomena are helping them use consumers to spread the word for them, allowing them to cut down on paid advertising,” the newspaper reported
“What does free advertising look like? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product.”
Levi’s have just launched their new “Go Forth” campaign which taps into the growing need among brands to be authentic and present their offerings as being in touch with the reality of their market, in this case men aged 18 to 34.
That does not mean that because we are in a global recession everything needs to be gloom and doom. The recession provides Levi’s with a point of connection with their market from where a message of optimism can sprout.
“...the sweet spot (in the target market is) the 22-year-old guys getting their first jobs out of college” — or not getting those jobs, because of the economy,” Doug Sweeny, vice president for Levi’s brand marketing, told The New York Times.
“They’re realists; they understand the challenge. They’re optimistic about the future, they can project forward,” the newspaper quoted Sweeny. “We found that really powerful and tried to evoke it in the campaign.”
The campaign is the first work for the Levi’s brand from Wieden & Kennedy and will include commercials, print, outdoor, social media, events marketing, and a web-based contest.
“The ‘Go forth’ campaign is replete with Americana imagery, in keeping with research indicating that teenagers and 20-somethings are patriotic and optimistic about the United States. Those elements include the poetry of Walt Whitman, flags, paeans to the pioneering spirit, declarations of independence, salutes to hard work and, in the star-spangled tradition of Madison Avenue, copious amounts of nubile flesh,” The New York Times reported.
In a recent McKinsey & Company survey, 90 percent of US respondents said “that their households had reduced spending as a result of the recession—one third of them ‘significantly.’ More than half said they expect to keep their expenditures down after the recession. As consumers return to more traditional spending patterns, companies need to develop a deep understanding of how this profound behavioral change affects strategies fundamental to value creation.”
Great rock concerts are great brand experiences and U2’s latest world concert tour which has just kicked off in Barcelona is set to create a new benchmark in audience experience thanks to the genius of the band and a 360 degree concert stage that redefines the rock concert stage.
“The stage has no front or back. Nor does it have the stacks of amplifiers that have been a rock concert fixture since the early days of the Grateful Dead. Instead, the speakers are embedded in four legs that rise 164 feet to support a cylindrical video screen,” Fast Company magazine reported.
The video screen is in fact 888 individual tiny LED screens that covers 3,800 square feet, weighs 60 tons and changes shape during the performance. The set was designed Hoberman Associates; Innovative Designs, which specializes in stage architecture; and Buro Happold, a structural engineering firm.
Above is a video of the stage in action during the opening performance of the band’s world tour. Below is an artist’s sketch of the stage and the stage in operation.
The Economist is well-known for its long-running ad campaign of succinct and witty text against a red background. Distilled this brilliant campaign aligned the successful with reading The Economist. That campaign is a tough act to follow so there is much interest in the new campaign The Economist is releasing.
Red Wires marks the beginning of an attempt by The Economist to reach people who may not yet consider themselves to be readers of the publication. The Economist describes these people as the “intellectually curious”.
“(The campaign) was sparked by research undertaken by (The Economist) last year which discovered that, because of the rise in the number of people going on to university, there are now over 3 million people in the UK whose interest in world affairs, travel, news and politics suggests an unconscious affinity with what The Economist reports on every week.” Nigel Ludlow, UK managing director of The Economist Group, said.
The new campaign uses the image of wire jumper Florent Blondeau walking through a city on a series of red wires and the strap line “Let your mind wander” as a metaphor for the connecting of different ideas that may interest the “intellectually curious”.
The 70 second cinema and television ad was created by Abbot Mead Vickers BBDO and directed by Tom Carty. It will be released in cinemas on 3 July and shown in an extended 70 second break during the UK’s Channel 4 News on Sunday 5 July.
Following up on its television commercial featuring staff “dressed” only in body paint, Air New Zealand has just released a new in-flight safety video with more paint-clad staff taking passengers through the rituals of air safety. The campaign, which includes chief executive Rob Fyfe, promotes the fact that the airline’s price does not come with hidden costs, something Air New Zealand says competing airlines do. Despite being the dominant airline in New Zealand, Air New Zealand is known for being a quirky and nimble brand. In 2008, the airline paid people in the northern hemisphere to shave their heads and wear temporary tattoos that read, “Need a change? Head down to New Zealand.”
As brands increasingly embrace the digital arena to communicate and interact with their markets, those providing the digital platforms and shaping the communication need to work together to provide brands with an effective experience.
Overall the online communication model for brands isn’t firing on all cylinders, far from it. The presence of third-party brands is often an afterthought in the design of online experiences (Google being the exception, most of the time) and their communication has often been relegated to the sidelines.
In an attempt to correct the situation, advertising agencies and Internet companies are coming together to build the models and harness the potential for online advertising as shown by Google’s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Steven Ballmer both attending their first Cannes Lions, The New York Times reported.
“With consumers spending more and more time online, analysts say Internet companies and ad agencies have no choice but to work together to develop ways to make money from digital media.”
“There was an air of inevitability about it, because of the model not really working yet, and there’s so much content that will be dependent on it working,” digital marketing commentator Paul Kemp-Robertson told the newspaper.
Read here for more on what technology companies and ad agencies are doing to work together.
Cost cutting has implications for brands, especially if the brand was operating efficiently before the cuts were made. Having said that, recessions seldom leave brands with the luxury of going on as before. The above chart of a “disguised” wireless-telecommunications company and explanatory paragraphs below from management consultancy McKinsey & Company offers insight into how to cut enough but not too much.
“Consumer-facing businesses whose revenues are now under pressure may find themselves having to compromise on customer service—for example, by reducing their hours of operation or the number of service workers they employ. Not surprisingly, McKinsey research shows that customer satisfaction scores are falling in some industries. Yet most executives think that reducing service levels is a mistake. How can a business maintain them while reining in costs? Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries shows the wisdom of challenging long-held but seldom-reviewed beliefs about service and testing them analytically. Very often, they turn out to be wrong.
“Consider the experience of one wireless-telecom service provider that carefully measured the average time-to-answer in its call centers and identified the “breakpoints” to determine its customers’ bottom-line sensitivity to service-level changes. Answering the phone in less than a certain number of seconds (X on the exhibit) produced delight; keeping customers on hold for more than Y seconds left them strongly dissatisfied. By relaxing service levels to a point just before this “patience threshold”—but making sure that it wasn’t crossed—the company saved money on staff without hurting satisfaction levels significantly.”
